Artists/bands that were once quite popular, yet nowadays are mostly ignored in canonical history books

Moxy Fruvous

Had to google that!

Town and Country — along with Jack Bruce’s “Theme From An Imaginary Western” — is my favorite of the UK responses to Music From Big Pink (and there were many). They knew how to channel their heaviness on that record, though I dig the Fillmore stuff for its borderline (and not-so-borderline) absurdity. To his credit, as over-the-top as he was, Marriott never flirted with the nadir of human vocalizing that is Robert Plant attempting to scat-sing.

You lucked out in the 90s, evidently. But yeah, "King of Spain" ("now I eat humble pie") was a #1 in the true north.

xp

If that means you've never heard of Jian Ghomeishi, you really lucked out.

Haha, no, my luck ran out around the time Serial Joe's 'Mistake' hit the airwaves and it's been downhill ever since. I was only aware of Ghomeshi via his CBC gig before the allegations exploded, and for whatever reason none of the articles I read on the topic referred to his time in Moxy Früvous (although 'King of Spain' does in fact ring a distant bell).

I never thought about HP's relationship with Big Pink, that's an interesting observation. I always think of Town & Country as being in the same realm as Fleetwood Mac's Kiln House, that intersection of folk, country, blues, and rock that signified you were being "progressive" at the time, without being prog rock. Maybe it's the Buddy Holly covers that make that connection for me. It's my fave Pie record of the ones I've heard, by far.

xps "humble pie" comes from "umble pie" which was a pie made with entrails, all the poor could afford. For those of you who've just eaten.

It’s definitely my favorite of theirs. I don’t know of any explicit connection to Big Pink — that is, I haven’t read any interviews where they mention the Band or anything — but the cover and predominantly acoustic and/or relatively muted instrumentation for me evoke the UK “back to the land”/“let’s all live in a thatched-roof cottage!” aesthetic that a bunch of bands (Traffic especially) embraced around the emergence of Big Pink. Town and Country also has a kind of introspective spookiness/spooky introspection that I dig, and that Zep edged towards on things like “Tangerine.”

If I had to pick a favorite Humble Pie song, it’d be this:

https://youtu.be/WvD0wmdLT68

xp

Seem to recall a character from literature who always talked about being 'umble, maybe there was even a band named after him...

xp- yes, love “Shakey Jake” (in its rockin’ versions, as well).

this goddamn thread is moving so fast that no one has really stepped back and noted with incredulity that the guitarist in one of the biggest rock and roll bands to have ever existed now plays in Humble Pie with Jerry Shirley (I think he is playing the drums in this incarnation, although there appear to have been tours in which he has not), the third most famous Rainbow singer (although "Since you been Gone" is probly better known than any other Rainbow tune), a journeyman bass player who did more interesting things than I knew of until about 5 minutes ago, and Zoot Money.

Lol at James Redd.

I've never heard Bread!

My favorite reason for exploring old Pazz & Jop polls was to find albums I've never heard of or never thought to listen to, sometimes by artists who were familiar, and it ties into this thread because it's generally a good way of finding critically lauded albums that I rarely hear about it now. They still have their fans - a quick google search to learn more proves that fact easily - but otherwise I've never come across them.

Last one I dug up was Michelle Shocked's Short Sharp Shocked which placed in the top 5 of 1988. It was the year of a new singer-songwriter boom that some say recalled the folk revival of the 1960s. I actually don't find much of that work all that compelling - for example, "Fast Car" and "Luka" are great singles, and I absolutely love those songs, but their respective, well-meaning albums don't do much for me. Shocked got lumped in with them, but she could make the others look pretty innocuous in comparison. I liked Short Sharp Shocked instantly, I think it's a great album, but it's disappointing to read what's happened with her in the years since, the low point being her homophonic remarks (and at a show in San Francisco, of all places). Also surprising was how she shut down (unintentionally perhaps) third-party sellers who were trying to sell used copies of her music on Amazon. Maybe it was a meant to protest Amazon, but she even got an account shut down that was run by Goodwill in Tacoma, Seattle.

I'm Shocked she would do such a thing

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kgttPt_1IG0

The Turtles? I don't know if they're quite popular enough or ignored enough to qualify. They had a #1 hit, five Top 10s, nine in the Top 40--that's pretty popular. Do they get mentioned much today? I'd be surprised if they do.

https://i.imgflip.com/1xdxip.jpg

xxp Wow, she’s hardcore:

Any of my work you find on the internet is a bootleg. Unlicensed. Not on iTunes. Not on YouTube. Not on Amazon. Not on Spotify. If 80 year-old consent decrees and 110 year-old compulsory licenses did not protect corporate monopolies, my work wouldn’t be on Pandora or SiriusXM either.

Thirty four years into a career with complete ownership of an amazing, critically-acclaimed, internationally-recognized catalog, and I have managed to extricate myself from the biggest bootleg operation the world has ever seen. I’ve paid a high price, certainly. I continue to search for alternatives where creative control and artistic integrity might be practiced beyond our digital dystopia.

(She’s also offering a vinyl single for preorder at $100; guess she walks the walk.)

Yeah, it's buried in that ridiculously long Amazon thread I posted (the first link - I never got through the entire thing, it just goes on and on), but apparently, she retracted most of her violation notices and sent an email to all the sellers, telling them she was offering them an amnesty: she would take back the IP complaint, but she wanted them to join her in a lawsuit against Amazon and make a donation to the Socialist Party of America as sort of a fine for wrongdoing.

Socialists Against the First-Sale Doctrine(?)

She refers to the “Kung Flu” in that newsletter I copied from... maybe she’s joking, but what exactly are her, er, politics?

humble pie's "town and country" was a revelation this afternoon, thanks Tarfumes

UK responses to Music From Big Pink (and there were many)

this would make a good thread

the Buddy Holly covers

and this would be an interesting sub-topic for that thread:

blind faith - well all right
humble pie - heartbeat
derek and the dominos - it's too late
fleetwood mac - buddy's song
the beatles - maybe baby

what else ?

Grateful Dead - Not Fade Away

yes but not UK

"It's Too Late" was a Chuck Willis song, which Clapton was probably a little more familiar with than the Holly cover.

xp sorry, missed that detail

perhaps but i mean we can be a bit elastic here maybe

xp

The Beatles did "Mailman, Bring Me No More Blues" sometime in '69, turning up on Anthology 3.

Foghat: "That'll Be The Day"

John Lennon: "Peggy Sue"

beatles also did "Words Of Love"

...and "Crying Waiting Hoping" at the BBC.

Thought this next was for the BBC maybe, but no. The Fairport Convention had a side project called The Bunch which did a, um, bunch of covers including “Learning the Game,” a real keeper.

Stones did “Not Fade Away.”

Also Fairport Convention one of those bands influenced by The Band/tapping into something similar all though in the case much closer to the mark since they were trying to be some kind of UK equivalent.

Santana had a minor hit with their version of "Well All Right" in the late seventies.

> it's disappointing to read what's happened with her in the years since, the low point being her homophonic remarks (and at a show in San Francisco, of all places).

homophonic: when someone says clearly anti-gay things and then insists you just heard them wrong

michelle shocked sounds a lot like a certain person on the nww list who i won't name here with the initials fdb

don’t know whether it counts but let the record state that Mud did “Oh Boy”

I just heard "'65 Love Affair" by Paul Davis for the first time since ... well, possibly since it was on the radio in the early '80s. I looked him up, and indeed, not only did Paul Davis have a couple of other hits, but "I Go Crazy" (supposedly) once held the record for the longest chart run on the Billboard Hot 100. Weirdly, I've never heard that song before:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=THW-5OUTSt8

Nor have I heard any of his other singles, including "Cool Night," which went to #11 right before "'65 Love Affair." "Cool Night" is pretty slick, but "'65 Love Affair" is good enough that at some point I thought it was by Hall & Oates. Wiki says the official video "is composed entirely of news archives from the year 1965, including footage of then US President Lyndon Johnson, the Vietnam War, and the Watts riots." Ah, those were the days ...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9eHTZYglhZs

As a not-very-clever joke, my tweenage cousins once spent an entire evening calling up a Baltimore radio station every two or three minutes just to request "Cool Night." They played it twice, I think, before wising up.

I remember "65 Love Affair" well but don't particularly want to hear it again right now. I listened to a bit of "I Go Crazy." Dimly remember it but it made no impression on me then or now.

interesting. he has several songs above 50 on the Yachtski scale:

https://www.yachtornyacht.com/songs/227/Do-You-Believe-In-Love

https://www.yachtornyacht.com/songs/83/Cool-Night

https://www.yachtornyacht.com/songs/853/Let-Me-Know-If-Its-Over

A lot of what we consider to be seminal yacht rock acts (yeah, I can't believe I just typed that either) were pretty invisible, then as now. They were all over the radio back in the day, but Paul Davis, Firefall, Ambrosia, even Air Supply to some extent, interchangeable. A lot of people are shocked to see that many of these acts looked like Lynyrd Skynyrd.

I remember an ad in RS saying something like, "Ambrosia actually rocks, but you wouldn't know it from their hit single!"

Did some searching and yep:

https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/71ghcYbVZDL._AC_SL1000_.jpg

Ah, the lost art of record-ad copy.

That's funny - I think I came across some Ambrosia on one of those pandora radio station things recently, and was surprised at how, well, rockin' it sounded.

That's a great self-effacing ad, reminds me of the old VW "lemon" ad campaign, or even the cover of that Howlin' Wolf album that "he doesn't like either."

Are U2 still taken seriously by anyone aside from their diehard fans in 2020?

https://i.pinimg.com/originals/e7/de/e7/e7dee753650d4356cd7a4fc1b2fa388d.jpg

I tried to ignore him, but he keeps coming back into my life.

10,000 Maniacs seem to have gradually become erased, sadly

U2 will probably be rehabilitated after they retire and a respectable amount of time has passed